Month: January 2018

Pruitt Gets Pushback from Freight Industry

Pruitt EPA: Serving a VERY Special Interest

Let’s not assume that the transportation and freight industries are all on board with every environmentally hostile move made by the Trump administration—in particular the moves of that mendacious boot-licker of fossil fuel interests, Scott Pruitt.

Check out this January 28 piece from The Energy Collective on backlash from the freight industry at Pruitt’s proposal to exempt certain heavy polluters from existing emissions regulations:

Pruitt offers loophole to “glider trucks”

Note especially  the comment of one experienced heavy duty truck dealer referring to “days years ago when our truck shop was so thick with the exhaust from the trucks you could not see the other side of our shop.”  Here’s a guy (I assume a guy) who had first-hand, concrete visual evidence of the damage from heavily polluting vehicles of the past in his own shop—someone for whom environmental unfriendliness is more than a mere leftist catchphrase.  Imagine what he’s telling his grandchildren about Scott Pruitt. (And maybe the entire Trump administration.)

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Confirmed beyond a Reasonable Doubt: ExxonMobile Lied Big-Time

Researchers measure disconnect between science and public relations at ExxonMobil

Most readers of this blog are aware of a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil scientists have been reporting for decades, in a purely scientific context, and the company’s position as reflected in public statements and media “advertorials.”

But how big is the discrepancy? How about, enormous.

Two Harvard researchers undertook to pin down the magnitude of the discrepancy quantitatively—chiefly by content analysis—and the results surprised even me.  The thrust of the analysis rested on the frequency with which ExxonMobil scientists published scientific papers supporting the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change, versus the public statements and advertorials in media such as the New York Times.

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Cyclists More Law-Abiding then Drivers? Maybe.

Strictly law-abiding cyclists?  Not a majority!

As a generally law-abiding cyclist, I am reluctant to criticize a study that gives cyclists high marks for law-abidingness, but responsibility requires that I call out distortions, such as. . .

As reported in Outside magazine, a study by the Florida Department of Transportation tried to assess whether cyclists are more law-abiding than drivers, and concluded in the affirmative.

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Doctor Confirms Trump is a Monster

Trump out of excuses for toxic behavior

Yesterday we heard the official White House doctor reports President Trump to be in good health (due to “good genes” rather than healthy behavior) and scored perfectly on a cognitive test.

You may ask what sort of pressure was put on the doctor to give Trump a much better than passing grade. But, if we can take the good doctor at his word—keeping in mind whom he’s working for—it means that there are no excuses left for what the President says and does.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER , PART 3: When Neutron Stars Collide

On August 17th, 2017, the collision of two neutron stars 300 million light years away was observed, initially detected by the arrival of gravity waves. It was a watershed moment in both observational astronomy and astrophysics.

By last fall, you may have become somewhat blasé about gravitational waves: four occurrences had been reported to the public beginning in 2015, all of them involving the merging of black holes in enormously distant galaxies, to little effect on Earth—any tremor you might possibly have felt could equally have been produced by a FedEx van five blocks away going over a speed bump.

Ah—but what occurred last August,* and released publicly to mainstream media on October 16, was an extra special  event, arguably more interesting than any of the black hole stories. Not in the magnitude of gravity waves (again, something we animals would never have felt). . . but in the practice of astronomy, what came out of it was a game-changer, heralded by many as the advent of “multi-messenger astronomy.”

It was an astonishing event in (at least) three important respects:

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Women Kick Butt to Kick Off 2018

It’s a rising tide.  Momentum from the women of 2017 carries right into 2018.

Oprah Winfrey’s rousing speech at the Golden Globes fueled hopes that the #MeToo movement will be more than just backlash against exploitation and abuse by men.   It was also a  call for women not just to step up, but to move forward.  It was a call to arms.

And two days later,  Diane Feinstein took the fight to the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party, by releasing the transcript of testimony from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in defiance of Committee Chair Charles Grassley. That was the testimony by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS on investigations into Trump’s twisted history, that was conducted during the 2016 election.

The transcript of Simpson’s testimony itself—not classified, but kept under wraps by Grassley and his henchmen—revealed just what malicious games Grassley and his allies in deceit such as Lindsey Graham, have been practicing, in their attempt to undermine the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election.*

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Superintelligence: Proceed with Caution

Superintelligence: a Book, an Hypothesis, a Warning

After having earlier dismissed Artificial Intelligence as a bogeyman, I confess to being deeply frightened by the book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. (2014)

The book’s author is Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute and director of the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at the University of Oxford.  You can view his academic creds on Wikipedia. There’s an excellent profile of him—highly recommended—in The Guardian* at Guardian profile of Nick Bostrom

If you’ve heard much about Nick Bostrom or the Future of Humanity Institute, what follows could be a rehash. But I’ll plow ahead even though this book is four years old, for what it may be worth.

In the first paragraph, The Guardian puts the scope of Bostrom’s concerns this way:  “Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?”

The Guardian’s piece identifies Bostrom’s key themes, and is so informative (including telling nuances such as Bostrom’s finicky diet and germ phobia) that I have little of substance to add on the man himself, but the following is my take on the most salient messages from his signature work, Superintelligence.

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More on “The Other Addiction”

George Will gets one thing right

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post (link below), the conservative intellectual George Will engaged in one of  his favorite tasks of bashing other intellectuals for their dire predictions  of doom, using one of his favorite sages, Eric Hoffer.

There’s some truth in his point about doom-saying intellectuals, although on the tax bill issue he’s off the mark—he’s overlooking the long-term effects of the new tax bill.  Not that George Will is myopic; instead he skips the subject because slashing the corporate tax is an item of conservative faith.  He might think the cut was too big, but in principle it’s a move in the right direction. So he won’t talk about its defects.

The  “attention economy” and undermining of human will

It’s at the end of this opinion piece that George Will (not “human will”) puts his finger on something that’s really troubling: the internet heating public discourse to the boiling point,  especially in social media.

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National Insecurity

My thing is bigger than your thing.

The bigger, more powerful button.  The Wall. The exclusion of immigrants. Increased defense spending.  All of a piece in the vision of “America First.”

Donald Trump’s latest descent into juvenile posturing, the warning to Kim Jong-un of how he, the world’s mightiest leader, has a larger, more powerful nuclear button than “Rocket Man,” is the latest manifestation of not just Trump’s insecurity, but the insecurity of many who elected him. That’s those who see foreigners as jackals circling us,  tearing off—or ready to tear off at the first opportunity—the choicest pieces of America, feasting on our nation’s wealth and power in a torment by a thousand bites.

This may remind you of Richard Nixon’s characterizing the U.S. as a “pitiful, helpless giant,” as a justification for launching new military spending programs, which were later expanded under Reagan.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE EVER, Part 2: Exoplanet Binge

Stunning Revelations from Kepler Space Telescope Exoplanet Survey: MANY small planets

On June 19, 2017, NASA announced the release of the eighth Kepler catalog of exoplanet candidates—now totaling 4,034, of which 2,335 have already been verified as planets.  Here’s a link to the press briefing materials on the NASA website, that includes some absolutely cool visuals.

Kepler survey announcement June 2017

The news in June was that another 219 candidates had been added since the last announcement, 10 of which had characteristics of size, distance from host star, and sun-like nature of the host star,  that suggest conditions hospitable to life as we know it.  Rocky planets with diameters between 0.7 and 2 Earth diameters are the most promising if they fall within the “Goldilocks Zone” where liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

Turns out, contrary to what I had been expecting from the news about huge exoplanets dribbling out over the last decade, now we hear that “small planets are common”  according to NASA. Note that “small” is in the eye of the beholder. NASA qualifies a planet as “small” if it is less than four Earth diameters.  The trend toward the discovery of “gas giants” exoplanets early on was due to the difficulties, with less sensitive instruments and less sophisticated methodology, of detecting the smaller objects.

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